about turning data into insightful knowledge – for business and personal curiosity

Main menu

Tag Archives: mooc

In case you are interested in learning about MongoDB or generally curious about non-relational approaches to storage of data then my recommendation for you is to check out the online courses offered by MongoDB Incorporation. I promise you won’t be disappointed. MongoDB Inc’s educational department – MongoDB University – offers five courses for developers and dev ops:

Attending “Discrete Time Signals and Systems” by Richard Baraniuk from Rice University was an awesome experience on many levels. Right after “Learning from Data” my second favorite MOOC so far. First of all the subject of extracting a signal from a discrete time series in terms of frequency composition is interesting by itself and provided a smooth opportunity for me to revise some of the math I studied many years ago. But this by itself wouldn’t make a learning experience that superb – what it takes for that is a teacher who knows how to get the knowledge across to the student. And in that regard – apart from the science itself – Richard is a master! It was obvious how much effort Baraniuk and his team put into designing the course. Every detail about the lectures and the exercises seemed superbially well crafted. And this is apparently not by chance – as after googling the professor’s name I found that he is actually something like a MOOC evangelist and very passionate about offering such an opportunity to the learners around the world.

To deepen my knowledge about Machine Learning I decided last year to attend “Learning From Data” on edX. This online course was designed by Yaser Abu-Mostafa – a renowned expert on the subject and professor of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science at California Institute of Technology (Caltech). I can say without the slightest hesitation that this course was a wonderful intellectual experience. Prof. Abu-Mostafa conceived the course so skilfully that it was as much a joy to attend, as it was challenging. And this finding couldn’t be further from a naturalness, especially given that the syllabus took a path through quite theoretical terrain.

Did you know that top researchers and universties from all over the world offer their knowledge in structured and partly certified online courses? Well now you know! Those coures are refered to as MOOC which stands for “Massive Open Online Courses” and is for me one of THE digital discoveries of the year 2013. The three biggest platforms are currently edX, coursera and Udacity. I am following courses on all of those three and I really sometimes can’t believe how awesome this opportunity is.